What is the value of sniffing the local ssids? As far as I know it is just to get a better and faster lock on location (sometimes GPS signals are weak) and therefore give better navigation. Does anyone know of some other purpose?
> The design document showed that, in addition to collecting data that Google could use to map the location of wireless access points, Engineer Doe intended to collect, store, and analyze payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks
At this point, I’m skeptical of any data I provide Google; they are masterminds at combining multiple points of data into something useful.
This has a dual purpose.
From your perspective, that's true. It gives a better and faster lock on location.
But at the same time, it associate the WIFI with a location with the accuracy of a GPS.
So when you go into your laptop which has no GPS, the WiFi which you connect now has a real location association with it.
Presto. Now Google can track your real location on your laptop and any other WiFi enabled device.
> So when you go into your laptop which has no GPS, the WiFi which you connect now has a real location association with it.
The phone can associate the SSID with a physical location. Maybe also a MAC address?
From a web browser on the laptop, they'll have the wi-fi network's IP address. They won't be told the SSID.
They'll have different pieces of information. I don't think it will help to work out your physical location from a laptop's web browser.
To associate a wi-fi network with a physical location that's helpful for tracking a laptop either:
Your phone would need to authenticate to it and reach the internet to get the wi-fi network's IP address whilst on GPS
Or: wi-fi networks you're not connected to need to be broadcasting their public MAC address- so far as I'm aware they don't
To serve ads. They can tell a business a consumer was withing X distance if your establishment. We can show them an advertisement in google maps the next time they are near by if you gladly pay us
GPS is only so accurate on phones by itself. I assume harvesting SSIDs helps a lot for knowing specifically which stores you're shopping at in a dense area with weak GPS signal. It's very accurate with it's "How did you like visiting _____?" notifications and if you look at your location history I think it also accurately labels stores well.
Obviously knowing every store you visit is very useful advertising data.
Back when I was working on location for Google Maps navigation, we explicitly disabled the wifi-based location service, because it was less accurate, and occasionally started giving locations from several seconds ago.
Your phone is already gathering a list of every SSID it touches every second. If Google can eliminate the need to use GPS to confirm that you are sitting at your desk, it can eliminate a bunch of needless GPS calculations.
GPS itself doesn't use much battery at all, nor do the calculations that use it. GPS-enabled apps use a lot of battery because they have to constantly wake up the device and enable the antenna, but that hardly matters for a navigation app, which is already awake and scanning constantly. Most of the battery use on Google Maps nav comes from keeping the screen on, and re-drawing the map it shows.
Source: I used to be the lead GPS engineer on this product.
